An efficient distributed mutual exclusion algorithm for intersection traffic control

Abstract

As vehicular networking has recently been developed and commercialized, vehicular cloud computing has received much attention in various research areas, such as intelligent transportation systems and vehicular ad hoc networks. An efficient intersection traffic control using vehicular cloud computing is one of the key research topics in intelligent transportation systems. To efficiently deal with intersection traffic control via vehicle-to-vehicle communications, we design a distributed mutual exclusion algorithm that does not rely on broadcast, which introduces communication overheads; instead, our algorithm use point-to-point messages sent between the vehicles to keep network traffic load lower. In our algorithmic design, to pass an intersection, the lead vehicle on a lane must get permissions from a subset of other vehicles and its following vehicles on the same lane can follow the lead vehicle without permissions unlike the previous research. To evaluate the performance of our distributed mutual exclusion algorithm, we conduct extensive experiments. The results show that our algorithmic design is both effective and efficient.